We buy trucks in Jamestown

The row filed here is the Jamestown quarry, 26 employees on the MSHA record, and its coordinate lands 2.40 miles from the centroid of Jamestown town — a pit and a place that share the same few miles of road.

The ten-mile circle around it holds 447 structures, one of the four densest networks in this state. Of those, 7 are rated below legal loads: about one in sixty-four, and the third mildest share of any row we have measured in North Carolina.

The nearest of the seven is 5.50 miles from the pit, and the tightest a commercial vehicle could use is rated about 22.9 US tons gross against forty for a legal 80,000 lb truck. So the binding crossing sits five miles out and admits a bit under ten tonnes of stone. Nothing in this network makes routing the daily problem.

That is what a crescent network looks like once the city has grown out around the pit.

This is the Piedmont urban crescent, the belt running north-east from Charlotte through Greensboro and Winston-Salem to Burlington and Raleigh, where about two thirds of the state lives. The rock is the crystalline granite, gneiss, schist and diabase of the Carolina terrane, and the pits sit inside or beside the metropolitan areas they supply — which is why the circle here holds 447 structures where a coastal-plain circle holds sixty, and only 7 of them will not take a legal 80,000 lb truck whole.

Two things follow for a used machine. The market is continuous rather than seasonal, so the hours came evenly rather than in summer bursts. And the hauls are short and repeated into dense traffic, which puts brakes, clutch, suspension and tyres ahead of the engine. Ownership points the same way: nineteen of the twenty crescent rows we measured are held by two international producers, Martin Marietta and Vulcan, so the specification behind a fleet here was very likely a national one.

All of it runs under one statute, and on the open road that statute is more generous than any other we hold on file.

N.C.G.S. section 20-118 sets 20,000 lb on a single axle and 38,000 lb on a tandem, with gross weight varying by axle-group distance up to 80,000 lb. The tandem figure is the one to notice. Every other state we have read carries 34,000 lb there, so North Carolina allows four thousand pounds more on a tandem than Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, Ohio or Pennsylvania. On a dense load that is the limb that binds, which makes an identical 80,000 lb ceiling mean more here than it does elsewhere.

The same section grants a ten per cent tolerance on axle-group weights, and then writes down exactly what the tolerance does not reach: not the single-axle limit, not the tandem limit, not the 80,000 lb gross, not a posted bridge, and not the interstate system. It adds that no tolerance on those axle figures shall be granted administratively or otherwise. So it attaches to the axle-group table and to nothing else.

N.C.G.S. § 20-118. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the statute was last read for this batch.

Beyond the weight table, the paperwork comes down to that one sentence.

Everything after it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Both are ordinary, and neither stops a sale.

Two North Carolina rules are drafted differently enough from the rest to matter here. The state brands a vehicle salvage where the cost of repairs, parts and labour, exceeds seventy-five per cent of its fair retail market value — and it applies that test whether or not an insurer has declared a total loss. Several states make an insurer’s decision a route into the definition. North Carolina writes the insurer out of it.

The second is a six-year line, and it runs the opposite way from the states either side of it. For a vehicle up to and including six model years old the test is a straight seventy-five per cent. For one more than six model years old the same test applies, but the cost of replacing the air bag restraint system is left out of the repair figure — so the older truck gets the narrower basis and is branded less readily, where Missouri and Tennessee simply switch the rule off past a certain age.

N.C.G.S. § 20-4.01 and § 20-71.3. Information, not legal advice.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off the pit 2.40 miles out. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs across the crescent. Box trucks and straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go out with a crew.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them, and every one of them loads under the same 80,000 lb ceiling.

• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
• The engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route. Neither stops a sale.
• It never left the crescent. Is that a problem?Not a problem, but it points us at the right questions. City hauls wear brakes, clutch and suspension before the engine, and with only 7 of 447 crossings within ten miles rated below legal loads, this truck was rarely part loaded for a bridge. We would rather know than guess.
• The quarry is two miles from my yard. Does that mean anything for me?Only that we know the roads round you. The pit sits 2.40 miles from the middle of town and the nearest restricted crossing is 5.50 miles beyond it. It has no bearing on whether we buy your truck.
• Does somebody have to come out to it?No. We come to you and drive it away, we come to you and tow it, or we buy it remotely and arrange the tow with nobody visiting. Driving it to us is also fine.

Those come up most, and behind them the reasons have nothing to do with a pit 2.40 miles out or a crossing 5.50 miles from it.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and left one machine too many in the yard. Sometimes the truck is simply sitting, and every month it sits is another month of insurance on something that isn’t turning a wheel.

Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.